I guess that beavers do instinctively what mankind must learn to do eventually.
Eric Collier, Three Against the Wilderness, 1959
Derek Gow stood on the churned-over slicks of mud on the banks of our ‘re-naturalized’ stretch of the Adur, watching a ten-ton Hymac excavator scraping away at our over-engineered meanders and a gang of volunteers dragging saplings into the water to create woody blockages, his face a picture of bemusement. He was too diplomatic to pour cold water on our endeavours. There was enough of that swilling about on site already. But in his eyes this was hydrological burlesque. He knew there was a much easier and more effective way to achieve what we were after – one that would not only provide greater complexity, naturalism and efficiency in the system, but would also cost next to nothing. The solution was another keystone species missing from our landscape.
Beavers were once widespread in Britain. Once again our place names echo their presence, from Beverley and Bewerley in Yorkshire to Beverston in Gloucestershire and Beverley Brook running through Richmond Park down to the Thames. Exploited long before the Middle Ages, they were hunted to the brink of extinction in the sixteenth century, prized for their dense, silky fur and castoreum – the secretion from scent sacs close to the tail used for making perfume. Castoreum was also used as medicine – the concentration of salicylic acid, from which aspirin is derived, from the beaver’s ingestion of willow bark and leaves makes it an effective anti-inflammatory and analgesic. Beavers were also eaten by Catholics, who categorized them as fish, thus making them permissible for Holy Days and Lent, and were generally considered a pest for their interference in drainage schemes. A few beavers, nonetheless, may have clung on in backwaters into the eighteenth century. The very last record is in Bolton Percy in Yorkshire in 1789, when a church warden paid a bounty of tuppence for ‘a bever head’.
Derek, an ecologist and reintroduction specialist, has devoted much of his life to returning this lost animal to Britain, though he began his conservation work in the service of water voles. ‘It was the water vole that introduced me to the beaver,’ he says. The connection between the two is, for Derek, an example of the complex inter-species relationships our modern environment has lost.
Water voles had entranced Derek ever since he was startled to tears as a young boy on holiday in his native Scotland by a couple of fighting males falling into the stream beside him as he fished for sticklebacks. Galvanized by a survey in 1992 showing a 95 per cent crash in a species once common throughout our waterways, Derek devoted himself to re-establishing sustainable colonies in Britain. ‘It’s not often you can call a wee furry mammal a keystone species, but the water vole is definitely one.’
The deep, convoluted burrow systems water voles excavate in river banks provide habitat for grass snakes, amphibians and other small mammals, as well as fertilizing the soil and stimulating different plant and invertebrate communities. Even the collapse of banks from over-burrowing creates opportunities for nesting sand martins and kingfishers. At 330 grams for an adult male, compared to 30 grams for a male field vole, the disappearance of water voles is a huge prey loss for species like herons, buzzards, owls, kestrels and foxes. As numbers continue to plummet – from 1.2 million in the UK in the early 2000s to around 300,000 today – the impact on our ecology, Derek believes, is incalculable.
Water voles have been devastated by repeated releases of American mink – both escapees and those liberated by animal-rights activists – from fur farms in Britain from the 1950s until fur farming was banned in 2000. Their natural defence mechanisms – springing out from the river bank into the water with a surprisingly loud plop, fondly remembered by canoeists and fishermen a generation or two ago, or diving and resurfacing in dense vegetation with their ears, nose and eyes barely breaking the surface – are effective to a degree against native predators. But they offer little protection against a non-native, fast-breeding, notoriously efficient killer like the mink. When mink first appeared on Knepp Lake in the 1980s, water voles were the first to vanish. Next were ducklings, moor-chicks and goslings. Gone were the days when Charlie’s grandfather would take him out in the rowing boat to prick the eggs of crop-destroying Canada geese. Suddenly there were no eggs of any water fowl to be found. With no national strategy – even now – for managing wild populations of mink, control is left in the hands of landowners and local communities. Through the 1990s the local mink hounds, a motley bunch of enthusiastic mutts, would flounder about our waterways in search of quarry, hallooing with excitement. It was a grand day out for all involved but their efficacy was doubtful. We once watched a mink slide unnoticed straight through the splashing, yelping melee. Traps were more successful. We caught thirty-five in a month one winter.
But again, questions arise as to whether this alien, efficient killer as it is, is the prime cause of the water voles’ decline. Had we otters, polecats and pine martens thriving in our ecosystem still, one wonders whether the mink would have colonized so successfully. Otters, in particular, kill mink kitts and occasionally adults too. Where otters have a presence in Britain, mink numbers are conspicuously low. Perhaps, like so many other ‘invaders’, the mink has simply scampered through an open door.
It is loss of habitat that Derek considers the fundamental threat to the survival of the water vole. The water vole is another ‘meta-population’ species that depends on habitats connected together like links in a chain. Colonies expand in summer to interbreed with nearby colonies and then contract in winter. By the 1990s Britain’s ubiquitous loss of wetlands meant that these colonies had become isolated and fragmented, the chain links broken. Water voles now have to cross vast, hostile landscapes to find mates, and the chances of breeding are growing slimmer and slimmer. Derek began raising captive water voles (10,000 to date) at his farm in Devon for release into restored areas of wetland where mink could be controlled. So far he has successfully established colonies in twenty-five sites in the UK, from Aberfoyle in Scotland to the River Meon in Hampshire and our neighbouring river, the Arun. It was during the course of this work that he began to consider the water vole’s association with another keystone species.
‘There I was, building dams and opening up ponds in sunny wetlands as habitat for the water vole and I realized there must have been a mechanism doing this before us,’ says Derek. ‘It’s obvious, really. It’s the beaver.’
Close observation suggested another, subtler relationship between the species. ‘Water voles rescue their babies from floods. They carry them off to secondary nests created specifically for this purpose. The readiness with which they do this, at the slightest sign of rising water, indicated to me they were used to living in very dynamic water-systems. It isn’t just rainfall they’re prepared for. Beavers can build a dam in hours. Suddenly, overnight, a small channel can become a pond. Water voles have evolved to react instantly, and regularly, to the engineering work of the beaver.’
It is almost impossible, now, to imagine how profoundly our British landscape has been shaped by the beaver. Throughout human history the fortunes of the beaver, tied to the fortunes of men, have waxed and waned. Already in the Mesolithic period (10,000–8,000 BC) in Britain there are signs of land under human drainage. From then onwards the beaver’s dominion of our wetlands came under increasing pressure. Under Roman rule, as farmland expanded, marshes were drained, and wilderness was hunted out for meat and pelts, beaver numbers declined dramatically. They recovered again in Saxon times and were still evident in the eleventh-century Norman countryside. But by the twelfth century, at the latest, the beaver was no longer the landscape manipulator it had been. And by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when England began importing Dutch engineers to drain its marshlands, beavers throughout Europe had been persecuted to the verge of extinction. Nevertheless, in 1577, William Harrison, Canon of Windsor, a contributor to the Act for the Preservation of Grain (also known as the Tudor Vermin Acts) which declared public enemies of numerous species in Britain from harvest mice to sparrows, gives a vituperous description of the beaver as a ‘monstrous rat . . . of such force in the teeth, that it will gnaw an hole through a thicke planke, or shere through a dubble billet in a night’.
We get an inkling of the beaver’s enormous creative potential, though, from the landscape of North America at the time of European settlement. The North American beaver is a distinct species, with forty chromosomes to the Eurasian’s forty-eight. The two never interbreed, even in captivity. They are thought to have diverged about 7.5 million years ago when beavers crossed the Bering Strait land bridge into the North American continent. Nevertheless, in visual appearance, behaviour and environmental impact, the American beaver is virtually indistinguishable from its European cousin.
For millennia Native Americans had lived alongside the beaver without significantly impacting its numbers. Before the arrival of European fur trappers in the 1600s, there are estimated to have been at the very least 60 million beavers in the continent of North America, from the Arctic tundra to the deserts of northern Mexico, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, with beaver dams every hundred yards along most small rivers. Many ecologists put the figure higher – in the hundreds of millions. In the drier Western states beaver dams stabilized water levels, prevented streambed erosion and provided vital systems for water storage. In the mountain states, they provided protection from flooding by storing the spring flush of water from melting snow. Native Americans considered them ‘the sacred centre’ of the land.
‘If we take this beaver density and apply it to Britain before the dawn of human agriculture, we can envisage complex systems of ponds and channels in all our valleys. The landscape would have looked totally different. And the effect the beaver’s manipulation of our wetlands would have had on wildlife is simply immense,’ Derek says. ‘Beavers can literally breathe life into the land.’
He dreams of the day when beavers will be paddling, again, in every river in England. We wondered whether Knepp might be suitable for a beaver reintroduction. It had been on Charlie’s letter of intent to DEFRA back in 2000. But, like the bison and the wild boar, the beaver had fallen off the agenda as a dream too far. Gazing out across Knepp Mill Pond at the rapidly silting margins and the bow-lake choked with scrub and weeds, Derek’s eyes lit up. ‘They’d coppice that willow carr in a trice and you’d have open water again,’ he said. ‘They’d love it here.’
The prospect of beaver reintroductions in the UK has been a subject of controversy for some time. Anglers particularly oppose the idea, convinced that beavers adversely affect fish stocks. A surprising number of people, perhaps confusing them with otters, think that beavers are pescatarian. Even C. S. Lewis portrays Mr and Mrs Beaver in Narnia tucking in to trout and potatoes. In reality, though, their characteristic buck teeth would be useless in a fish fight. Self-sharpening secateurs, their bright orange gnashers, fortified with iron, are designed for chopping timber, bark and woody vegetation. Those fishermen that acknowledge beavers as plant eaters still insist that their dams place barriers in the way of salmon and trout migration. Land managers are concerned about damage to trees, water courses, ditches and crops. And then there is that pervasive general British nervousness about loss of control. Who knows what might happen? We have lived without the beaver, too long, people say, to start reintroducing it now.
The genie, however, is already out of the bottle. Introductions, both accidental and intentional, are already upon us. The catalyst, according to Derek, was in 1982, when the UK ratified the Berne Convention on the Conservation of European Wildlife and Natural Habitats. Under the convention, countries must consider the reintroduction of extinct native species, particularly keystone species, wherever feasible. By the 1990s, reintroductions in Europe had demonstrated how easy – and beneficial – it is to return beavers to the wild. In Scotland, Dick Balharry, chair of the John Muir Trust and the National Trust for Scotland, broached the idea with Scottish National Heritage who, however, strongly opposed it, citing, amongst other worries, problems of quarantine. Still, small independent zoos and wildlife parks in Scotland and England began, with Derek’s help, to import animals from Poland, to demonstrate that beavers can happily survive quarantine, and to begin to acclimatize the British public to the idea of beavers in the landscape. They were, Derek says, ‘lighting candles in the dark’.
It was 2001 when word began to spread of beavers on the loose. Hugh Chalmers of the Borders Forest Trust phoned Derek from his canoe in the middle of the Tay. ‘Have you lost a beaver?’ he said. ‘’Cos one’s just swum right past me.’ Several years earlier, it is thought, beavers slipped out of Auchingarrich Wildlife Park in the southern Scottish highlands after one of the keepers, having electrocuted herself climbing an electric fence, switched off the power. But the beavers, notorious escapologists, could have come from a number of sources, including another two enclosures on private estates, both with water courses that flow into the Tay. There is, of course, also the possibility that frustrated advocates for the beaver had taken matters into their own hands – ‘black ops’ as it is known in the conservation world. Wherever they came from, by 2001 there was a thriving colony, untagged and unchipped, living on Tay-side – Britain’s largest river catchment and close to the site of Britain’s earliest carbon-dated remains of beaver dams and lodges (between 1,500 and 8,000 years old) in the submerged woodlands of Loch Tay. The success of the escapees from private collections embarrassed the Scottish government into action. In May 2009, a trial release by Edinburgh Zoo and the Scottish Wildlife Trust was sanctioned on Forestry Commission land at Knapdale in Argyll. The Knapdale beavers – originally sixteen from Norway – gave birth to at least fourteen kitts in the first four years after their release, created 13,045 square metres of new freshwater habitat, equivalent to about ten Olympic swimming pools, and built numerous dams and lodges, the largest of which is the size of a double garage. Altogether, there are now thought to be several hundred beavers living free on Scottish rivers – though no one knows the exact number or precisely where they have spread. Tourists were already flocking to see the beavers in their natural habitat. But uncertainty about these immigrants’ status – whether the Scottish government was, ultimately, going to grant them leave to remain, or have them deported – was fuelling resentment in local communities. With no compensation for flooded agricultural land, farmers had already shot a number of beavers in and around the Tay.
In 2009, when we met him, shortly after the Knapdale beaver trial had begun, Derek was looking for a trial site where he could lobby support for a beaver reintroduction in England. On closer investigation the River Adur, porous in its upper reaches and over-engineered from Knepp to the sea, was not ideal. A more natural and self-contained catchment area involving a variety of land managers and public access in order to gauge response would be more useful. While Derek continued his search, he proposed setting up an organization that would act as a forum for discussion about the beaver in England and that would try to bring all the vested interests together, avoiding the polarization that seemed to be happening in Scotland.
In July 2010 the Beaver Advisory Committee for England was set up. I had petitioned for ‘Nice Beaver’ as a more engaging title but was overruled. Charlie was chair, and Derek Gow and Roisin Campbell-Palmer, conservation projects manager at Edinburgh Zoo and one of the managers of the Scottish Beaver Trial, also joined the board. Over the next few years, representatives from the National Farmers’ Union, Country Landowners’ Association, Farming and Wildlife Advisory Group, Wildlife and Wetlands Trust, Wildlife Trusts, RSPB, Environment Agency, National Trust, Friends of the Earth and the Forestry Commission met at Knepp to chew over the hopes and fears of beavers in English waters. Counterintuitively, perhaps, the Forestry Commission has long had an interest in beavers as forest engineers and is broadly, if cautiously, supportive, with their only real concerns being about the possible impact on expensive infrastructure such as culverts and roads. In their view the benefits could far outweigh the difficulties, provided an unsentimental attitude towards the management of beavers through relocation or culling could be adopted.
Though the Scottish Beaver Trial was being forensically documented, it soon became clear that nothing other than English evidence would sway English stakeholders. DEFRA, however, remained reluctant to grant a licence to release beavers in a trial on an English river. So, in 2011, the Devon Wildlife Trust, with Derek as consultant, set up a project to test the impact of beavers in a 2.8 hectare (7 acre) enclosure on farmland in west Devon.
A sign on the garage door announced a ‘BOLD VENTURE’. But when Charlie and I visited the Devon site in October 2014 the location was still a closely kept secret. Every precaution had been taken against escape. A rodent Colditz, the enclosure was ringed with a £35,000 steel mesh fence, 1.25 metres high reinforced with three strands of electric wire and a skirt of double sheets of weld mesh buried 90 centimetres underground.
Threading our way around felled saplings and gnawed tree stumps, over intricate canals and the odd sink-hole, it was hard to believe this was once soggy, secondary woodland along a trickling, 200 metre-long, canalized stream. In little over three years two adult beavers and their three offspring had created a braided system of channels, willow coppice and ponds – 1,000 square metres of open water – held by more than a dozen dams. In the middle of it all they had built their lodge, a heap of mud, sticks and moss, where – since we were visiting during the day – the nocturnal beavers were holed up, waiting for nightfall to resume their labours.
The effect on wildlife has been astonishing. In summer the air of this tiny beaver kingdom is thick with butterflies, hoverflies, damselflies and dragonflies. Banks grow water mint, bog pimpernel and orchids. Amongst the diverse mosses and epiphytes, a tiny oceanic liverwort, fingered cowlwort, has appeared. Ducks paddle the ponds, and marsh tits, willow tits, spotted flycatchers, grasshopper warblers, great spotted woodpeckers, tree creepers and lesser redpolls hunt insects in the trees. Grey herons and kingfishers dive for fish. Woodcock overwinter here, eating worms, beetles, spiders, fly larvae and small snails. The number of aquatic invertebrate species has risen dramatically, from fourteen in 2011 to forty-one in 2012. As have beetles – from eight species in 2011 to twenty-six in 2015. Five species of bat, including the rare barbastelle and Natterer’s bat, have been recorded on the site. Common lizards hunt through the deadwood understorey. Amphibians have proliferated. In the first year, 2011, project recorders counted ten clumps of frogspawn. In 2014 there were 370; in 2016, 580. There is even frogspawn dripping from the trees – spillage from the predation of herons on gravid frogs.
Most exciting of all for the Devon Wildlife Trust has been the reappearance of tall herb fen vegetation including purple moor grass and sharp-flowered rush – characteristic flora of Culm grassland, an endangered habitat of western Britain and Northern Ireland that has, through drainage, cultivation, overgrazing, burning and afforestation, declined 90 per cent over the past hundred years. Only 3,500 hectares (13.5 square miles) of Culm grassland survive in Devon.
But it is the impact on water that is likely to be most persuasive in the beaver’s favour. Careful monitoring of water flow across the site by hydrologists at the University of Exeter has shown that when slurry effluent flushes into the enclosure from the adjacent farm, the filtration system created by the beavers dramatically reduces pollution levels leaving the site. Levels of nitrates and phosphates in the water, entering the site as run-off from the surrounding farmland, are also reduced to virtually nothing. Soil run-off is captured, too. During storm events, surface water leaving the beaver-modified site contains three times less sediment than the water entering it. The three-hectare area, fed by a tiny headwater stream that would once have held only a few hundred litres of water, now holds a million. The series of a dozen or so leaky dams regulates outflow, reducing flood peaks and increasing base flows during droughts; so the graph of water volumes leaving the site, once a rollercoaster, now gently undulates. Over all, the water table has risen 10 centimetres. It is precisely the strategy that the inhabitants of Pickering and the Stroud Sustainable Drainage Project (an enterprise covering the whole of the 273 square kilometre catchment area of the River Frome in Somerset) have been implementing – by hand – to protect themselves from flooding.
The work being carried out by Exeter University at this tiny site in Devon is the most detailed ever conducted on the hydrology of beaver dams and will certainly add to our understanding of the beaver as the ultimate flood-control engineer. But in terms of the arguments in favour of restoring beavers to ecosystems, it is icing on the cake. Evidence from Europe and America is plentiful already, and on a much larger scale.
In North America by the 1930s only 100,000 beavers survived in remote areas of Canada after three centuries of trapping and shooting. Between 1853 and 1877 the Hudson Bay Company alone shipped 3 million beaver pelts to England. Today, beaver numbers have recovered to between 6 and 12 million across the Continent. There are now 70,000 beavers in the state of Massachusetts alone. The resurgence has triggered hundreds of scientific papers. At the University of Rhode Island, scientists have demonstrated how beaver ponds act as nitrogen sinks, with up to 45 per cent of nitrogen in water taken up by bacteria and aquatic plants proliferating in the standing ponds and stored in sediment. Their findings have been independently verified by the Soil Science Association of America. At Colorado State University, studies have focused on the carbon sequestration of beaver dams. The process of locking up carbon in the sediment of beaver ponds, geoscientists claim, could have a significant mitigating effect on climate change. At the Wildlife Conservation Society in Montana, scientists have demonstrated how beaver dams raise underground water levels, increase water supplies and substantially lower the cost of pumping ground-water for farming, as well as improving habitat for songbirds, deer, wapiti and – significantly – fish. In Wyoming, streams where beavers live have been shown to harbour seventy-five times as many water birds as those without, and the total biomass of all the creatures living in the water may be between two and five times greater in beaver ponds than in undammed sections. Other studies show how the silting up of beaver ponds, abandoned over time when supplies of vegetation ran out, is one of the primary ways in which new soils are created.
In Europe, reintroduction programmes in 161 locations in twenty-four European countries including France, Germany, Switzerland, Romania and the Netherlands have restored beaver numbers to more than 1.2 million from only 1,200 in eight relict populations in 1900. There are now beavers in river systems in almost every country of Europe. Scientific studies on free-living European beavers echo the findings of the United States. But perhaps more significantly for the recalcitrant British, densely populated Europe is demonstrating that it knows how to live with beavers.
There can be few landscapes as intensively managed as the German province of Bavaria. As far as the eye can see, the plains of the Danube are cultivated to the millimetre. Arable fields are vast and hedgerow-less; roadside verges are manicured, flower-less runways. Cows, pigs and sheep are generally reared indoors, even in summer. Forestry in the uplands produces around 4.85 million cubic metres of timber every year and counts for nearly 3,000 permanent jobs in administration and 2,300 in logging. Yet somehow, here, in an area substantially smaller than Scotland, humans are living alongside 18,000 beavers.
Gerhard Schwab is Derek Gow’s German counterpart. A mountain of a man with a forested beard and long grey hair snaking down to his waist, he introduces us to ‘Airport Beaver’ in a patch of woodland just minutes from the flight arrivals hall in Munich. We visit many beaver sites on our whirlwind three-day tour – from Bavaria’s highest beaver at 1,456 metres in Great Arber Lake to beavers in quarries, beavers on the Danube and beavers living free in community parks in town suburbs. But the most surprising site has to be where beavers have set up home in an angling club. Middle-aged men sit with their flasks and sandwiches, casting for zander and rainbow trout, manifestly unconcerned about the bank of logs and sticks looming over the far end of the pond. True, some of the most picturesque willows have had to be chain-link fenced to protect the fishermen’s shade and regulate the water temperature. Trout will not tolerate high temperatures as carp, pike and catfish do and would suffer in water exposed to direct sunlight. But this inconvenience is a price Bavarian anglers are entirely prepared to pay to accommodate the beaver.
‘Fishermen were some of the fiercest opponents when beavers returned to Bavaria in the 1960s,’ says Gerhard. ‘But the reality of living with them has changed their minds.’ Fish stocks in beaver ponds, where dams and lodges provide habitat for invertebrates and micro-organisms as well as protection for small fry against predation by larger fish, kingfishers and herons, have increased up to eighty times. Elsewhere, dams are proving no obstacle to fish migration – unsurprising, perhaps, considering that salmonids and beavers have co-existed for tens of millions of years. Providing voluntary services for an angling club for between seven and fifteen days a year is a condition of the fishing licence in Bavaria, and anglers now spend that time fencing trees and filling in beaver holes and runnels around ponds and rivers with bricks, so they can walk the banks and pitch their umbrellas. ‘Symbiosis,’ says Gerhard.
Bavarian farmers, too, are learning to live with beavers, thanks to an ingeniously simple and inexpensive flow device – the ‘beaver deceiver’ – pioneered in the US, which regulates the water level of beaver dams and keeps culverts open where arable fields are threatened.
‘Nine times out of ten, beavers do not cause a problem for farmers,’ says Gerhard. ‘And where they do, the problem is usually easy to rectify.’ An important tenet behind the confidence of Bavarian farmers is that ultimately, should all else fail, a beaver can be trapped or killed. ‘That knowledge alone has brought a far greater degree of acceptance,’ says Gerhardt. ‘It’s vital that farmers and landowners know the law is not going to slap a preservation order on the beaver and dictate that people have them on their land, come what may.’
Our little NGO, the Beaver Advisory Committee for England, was attempting to demonstrate to the British that European, Canadian and American anglers and farmers live perfectly happily with beavers when events leapt spectacularly ahead of us. A family of beavers was discovered living wild on the River Otter in Devon. A grainy, black-and-white night-vision video clip taken by retired environmental scientist Tom Buckley in February 2014 shows three beavers frolicking in the water, grooming each other and gnawing at trees. Unsurprisingly, it went viral. Many locals had known about the beavers for almost a decade but had kept quiet, fearing media attention and, above all, the authorities’ adverse response. They were right to worry. Shortly after the discovery DEFRA announced plans to trap the colony and return them to captivity on the grounds that they were an invasive species and could be carrying a disease which posed a risk to human health.
Once again, how the beavers had got there was a mystery. Suggestions they had escaped from a nearby nature reserve are probably less likely than the theory that wildlife vigilantes, or ‘beaver bombers’, as the press dubbed them, were responsible. Whatever their origins, Devon Wildlife Trust and locals in the nearby town of Ottery St Mary – including the farmer on whose land the beavers were filmed – rallied to oppose the government’s decision, signing petitions and posting ‘Save Our Beavers’ signs in shop windows. Ten thousand people sent messages to the Minster for the Environment urging that if the beavers had to be caught up for testing, DEFRA should re-release them straight back into the Otter if the tests proved negative.
Rising support for the beavers, not just in Devon but around the country, encouraged Friends of the Earth to challenge the government on the legality of their position. Britain, they argued, forms part of the ‘natural range’ of the Eurasian beaver and removing them would be against EU laws governing protected species.
As the flak began to fly, Devon Wildlife Trust held a number of public meetings to try to reach a consensus on pressing for the post-testing release of the beavers. In Derek Gow’s view, the groundwork done by BACE during the course of five years played a key part at these meetings in deciding the fate of the Devon beavers. ‘Ten years ago, you’d never have got environmentalists sitting down with anti-beaver pressure groups like the National Farmers’ Union. But we all knew each other from Knepp. We’d got along fine and there was an element of trust there. Everyone still had positions but they were willing to go along with an official trial release. DEFRA hadn’t a leg to stand on.’
On 23 March 2015, on the upper reaches of the River Otter, the silhouettes of the trees began to thicken in the gathering dusk, intensifying the cloak and dagger atmosphere. The film crew from BBC Springwatch were killing time, taking mood shots. The air of expectancy amongst the select band of onlookers – staff and trustees from the Devon Wildlife Trust, the young farming couple who owned this land, and Charlie and me – was almost unbearable. We paced the shingle spit, side-stepping fallen timber – evidence of the beavers’ previous years of industry – glancing at our watches, fretting about last-minute glitches. The phone call had come from Devon Wildlife Trust with just twenty-four hours’ notice. They had been waiting for the all-clear from tests carried out on the captured beavers at Derek’s farm by Roisin and her colleagues from Edinburgh Zoo. Now the animals, stamped with a clean bill of health and conspicuously ear-tagged, were ready to go. The government had finally agreed to a trial release on the Otter. Devon Wildlife Trust’s courageous position and their earlier investment in the ‘Bold Venture’ had paid off. It was a huge commitment for the tiny organization. Submitting the highly detailed licence application had been challenging enough, but they also undertook to provide financial and organizational resources, and pledged to manage all the complex licence conditions. In partnership with Clinton Devon Estates, Derek Gow Consultancy and the University of Exeter, Devon Wildlife Trust would lead the trial over a period of five years – at a cost of £500,000 – and measure the impact of beavers on the local environment, economy, community and wildlife.
At the end of those five years, in 2020, the government is expected to make a decision about the future of the beaver in England and, assuming the beavers in England behave as they behave everywhere else in the world, begin issuing other licences for release. Meanwhile, on 24 November 2016 the Scottish government finally gave the European migrant beavers in Scotland indefinite leave to remain, putting yet more pressure on England to do the same.
The thrum of an engine broke the stillness at last and Derek Gow’s pick-up pulled alongside the river. Three travelling cages were lifted out of the back and placed gently on the ground, exit hatches to the water. Rigid with anticipation on the opposite bank, cameras fixed on the cages, we stared into the twilight. This was history in the making. The first ever government-sanctioned reintroduction of an extinct mammal in England. One by one Derek lifted the flaps and three low shadows loped into the water and paddled away. The others would be released the following evening.
Two of the beavers slid down river and disappeared within seconds but the largest, a pregnant female, after a lap of honour, emerged onto the sand-spit in front of us to preen. The size of a portly spaniel, she sat up, whiskers diagnosing the air and, balanced by the flat scaly tail on the ground behind her, began to comb through her long, slick fur with a back claw. Perhaps the dream of having beavers at Knepp was not so far away. I could see her in the willow carr of Knepp lake or gliding the length of Hammer Pond, beavering away with a cohort of industrious little offspring, her youngest kitts sneaking a ride on her tail. Our concrete dams and Lego block slipways would be things of the past, the floodplains punctuated with woody debris blockages not of our own making, our clumsy, artificial scrapes a staircase of pools, Spring Wood a resurgence of coppice. And with this watery refinement a whole habitat would spring to life, an aqueous kingdom such as Knepp has not seen since the early Middle Ages, a place of vegetative complexity where even water voles would have a sporting chance to outwit the mink.